ABSTRACT
Ostensibly Grey Eminence is a biography of Father Joseph, the aristocrat who became a Capuchin friar and later an agent and collaborator of Richelieu. By lending his sinister talents to the promotion of the Thirty Years War and the preparation of France for the tyrannical nationalism of Louis XIV, Father Joseph became one of the forgers of 'the long chain of crime and madness which binds the present world to its past.' As a biography the book is an only partly successful product of Huxley's now rather flaccid and uncritical intellectualism. But it is not meant to be primarily a biography. It is a piece of propaganda for the religious mysticism which Huxley and Gerald Heard have transplanted from the quagmires of British pacifism to the propitious atmosphere of Southern California. Heard's eight or nine volumes on the subject constitute the official historiography and teleology of the sect. Huxley, since the appearance of Eyeless in Gaza (1936), has functioned largely as a publicist for the new religion. In this latest book, the life and character of Father Joseph symbolize what Huxley and Heard take to be the dilemma of civilized man.
